Back to Basics: A Beginner’s Guide to SlideShare

SlideShare is often described as the “sleeping giant” of content marketing. While it doesn’t get as much mention as the other social sites, it can be an extremely powerful tool to increase exposure of your online content. In this article, we will introduce Slideshare and ways businesses and organizations can use it to extend brand reach and awareness.

What is Slideshare?

Slideshare is a free social website that allows uses to post content such as PDF documents, powerpoint presentations, video, and other pieces as a presentation. The presentations, once uploaded on Slideshare, become public and can be viewed and shared by anyone. Because of this, Slideshare can help businesses who share content on the site increase the brand awareness, extend reach to other audiences, and build even more referral traffic to a website or blog.

Why Slideshare?

The Stats:

Slideshare receives 500% more traffic from business owners than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. (CMO)

Since its creation in 2007, SlideShare has had more than 10 million presentation uploads, drawing 50 million visitors and 3 billion views in a month. (CMO)

Mobile views on SlideShare are on the rise, which has seen a 223% jump from last year. (CMO)

SlideShare Benefits and Features:

Embedding Power: One of the greatest SlideShare features is that a user can upload content on SlideShare, take that presentation and embed it anywhere. This increases SEO efforts and increases the clout and value of your content. You'll often see SlideShare presentations at the bottom of blog articles.

Featured Homepage: If a SlideShare presentation gathers enough views and shares, it gets placed on the site’s homepage, where it can go viral overnight.

Improve SEO: Uploading content onto SlideShare offers another medium the content can sit in, which increases the chance it will be ranked by Google in search results. At times, Google will even rank a SlideShare presentation above blog articles and YouTube videos.

Getting Started on SlideShare

Before you begin uploading content on SlideShare, here are some recommendations for getting started:

style="color: #ff9900;">1.Keep it Simple

Since SlideShare is meant to be a presentation, keep it simple by adding bullet points, breaking down text, and use bold text when necessary to make it easier for users to click through to each slide.

style="color: #ff9900;">2. Add Great Images

Eye-catching images and fonts speak volumes, which is helpful if you’re trying to keep things simple.

style="color: #ff9900;">3. Make Your Title Searchable

A presentation’s title is what makes it searchable. Include relevant words, numbers, and phrases to make sure your audience finds it. Make sure to make your title large enough on the first slide to catch plenty of attention. Phrases like, "How to" and "Top 10" are popular phrases to include into a SlideShare presentation.

style="color: #ff9900;">4. Add the Appropriate Tags

Tags make it even easier for users to find content and you can upload up to 20 tags. This, of course, will depend on your subject matter. For example, this blog post would have the tags #slideshare #socialmedia #digitalmarketing #smm and so on.

style="color: #ff9900;">5. Include a Description

Including a description would do even more for increasing your SEO. Make sure to include those highly searchable terms you included in your title and tags within the description as well.

style="color: #ff9900;">6. Share it Everywhere

Increasing exposure of your content is the key to making content go viral. Don’t forget to share your SlideShare presentations on other social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+.